Freshwater Seas

Dracula

by Bram Stoker

Adapted for the stage by Robert Bethune and Philip Hilden

How we see this play and this story.

The vampire will not die. Transfix him as we will, to the page, to the stage, to the
screen both large and small, we cannot kill him. He lives on in our souls, a dark
seductive presence, terrifying and beguiling, seductive and repellent, repugnant yet
fascinating. He will not die because like all the great mythic figures, the hero, the
lover, the maiden, the king, the witch, the miraculous infant, the wise old man, the
trickster, the queen, the saint, the devil, the angel, the vampire is of us. We create him
in our own image, drawing him from the depths of our own souls.

What is the vampire to us today? Why do we return to this story in hundreds of books
and plays and films?

He is evil incarnate; he is also evil conquered. His black inversion of life includes
macabre reversals of love, of marriage, of the nurture of infants; he gives his horrid
gift of insatiable immortality with the righteousness of the true believer. Yet he is
conquered, and not by technology, to which he is immune (and there's a thought) but by
force of character: the simple, shared comaraderie and courage in the face of terrible
evil that is one of the most redemptive attributes of humanity.

There is nothing so terrifying in the myth of the vampire as the sexuality that forms
one of its most potent energies. The sexual aspect of the Dracula myth is expressed
carnivorously, not carnally. Dracula's pleasures are expressed as a demonic version of the
infant suckling; the breast becomes the throat, milk becomes blood, but the pleasure and
satiety are the same, even though the bloated figure of Dracula seems more a leech than a
lover to a horrified Jonathon. This black inversion of a fundamental human energy rivets
the mind with horrific force.

In this story, blood is the fluid of love--and not just for vampires. The transfusions
given to Lucy are gifts of love. The sharing of blood becomes an equivalent of marriage.
Arthur feels that Lucy is his wife in the sight of God. Blood is made the equivalent of
milk when Dracula forces Mina to drink his blood. Dracula holds Mina in a dark travesty of
the way a mother holds an infant. Dracula's attack on Mina Harker in which he forces her
to drink his blood becomes a kind of black marriage or vampiristic rape, the inversion of
the marriage represented by the blood transfusions.

The vampire is surely one of the darkest myths ever to emerge from human consciousness,
yet it is ultimately the story of the power of humanity to redeem itself through love and
courage. The banding together of these people who dared do so much is like the psychic
action of a person gathering his strength to confront the inner darkness. In those silent
hours with the blackness within, we know the vampire is real--not in the superficial,
material sense, but in the profound sense of the realities extant in our souls. The
darkest forces in us have a powerful role to play. When we deny and distort them, they
become the terrible demon who must be fought, but when their energies are balanced with
love and light, they lose their blackness and are redeemed in their true place as part of
that which makes us himan, just as Dracula, in the end, finds peace. Ultimately, that is
the lesson of the vampire.

The nature of this play

Our treatment of this myth of ancient horror is not for children. We do not minimize
the genuine horror and sexuality of the story. It is not camp; it is not played for
laughs, though it does have important scenes of comic relief; we take the myth of the
vampire seriously. It is not a marathon; we follow where Bram Stoker leads,
carefully condensing and pruning his expansive novel into a tightly structured theatrical
experience of normal length. We dissected the events and chronology of his story down to
the minutest detail, and we found that his work is seamless; grant him only the premise
that there can be such a being as a vampire, and all else follows with flawless
probability and necessity.

In the end, the audience should feel that they have been with our characters on a
tremendous journey, a quest with life and death at stake, not just for their lives, but
for their souls as well. The end of the play--the final victory over the vampire--is a
transcendent victory over evil incarnate.

This play is a play--not a dramatization with narration and dialogue. It is a fully
realized play for the stage, conveying story through action and dialogue. We do go so far
as to use Stoker's convention in which written messags convey important events and
information, but we always present such messages in the mouths and by the actions of the
characters who write and send them.

Last but not least, we embrace the emotional richness of the 19th century language and
characterization. In many cases, we draw our dialogue directly from Stoker.

How the story is told

We begin, with Stoker, in Transylvania, as the English solicitor, Jonathon Harker,
arrives there. Giving no heed to the warnings given him by the local people, he goes tothe
castle, and there finds himself both the agent of Dracula's plans and the plaything
promised to his undead sisters. Against all odds, Harker escapes with his life; but
Dracula succeeds in his plan to go to England.

Unlike most adaptations, we follow Dracula's voyage on shipboard. We transform the log
kept by the ship's captain into a sequence of scenes both terrifying and darkly comical,
as the sailors on board the ship realize that something is terribly wrong; that
something--and not a living something--is on the hunt, and they are the prey.

The scene changes to England, where a beautiful young woman, Lucy Westenra, is much
occupied with the three men who have offered to marry her. Her friend, Mina Murray, is
engaged to marry Jonathon Harker. Mina is visiting Lucy while waiting for Jonathon to
return from Transylvania. They read of the strange shipwreck, little knowing that Dracula
has arrived on that very vessel and is now loose in their community. Dracula finds Lucy
and preys upon her by night. By day, she sickens and weakens. One of her suitors, Dr.
Seward, baffled by trying to heal her, calls upon his friend from Amsterdam, Dr. Van
Helsing. Van Helsing, a man of mysterious background, recognizes the symptoms, but not the
cause; he does not realize that he is dealing with the arch-vampire himself until it is
too late to save Lucy's life.

While Van Helsing tried to save Lucy, Mina received a message from the hospital where
Harker has been a patient; he has only recently recovered his sanity. She travels to
Transylvania and brings him home, but cannot understand his condition. When Van Helsing
contacts her to learn more about Lucy, she asks him to advise her about Jonathon. When she
shows him Harker's journal, Van Helsing connects the dots and understands fully what they
are dealing with.

Renfield begs to be taken away.(David Cohen and Michael Frizalone. Photo by Phil
Hilden)

Van Helsing gathers together the people who know the gravity of the situation and
understand that no matter how strange it is, it is terribly true: Mina, the men who loved
Lucy, and Harker. They plan how to attack the vampire. They track down his lair--an
abandoned chapel near Dr. Seward's hospital. We see a confrontation between Van Helsing
and Dracula--an element missing from Stoker's novel, but essential to a full understanding
of the nature of the vampire. Van Helsing is even more determined to destroy Dracula,
having barely escaped with his life. He has, however, succeeded in sanctifying Dracula's
lair; the monster is now on the run.

Dracula, however, has his own plans; he attacks them first. He is able to enter the
hospital because he has gained a grip on the disturbed mind of one of Seward's patients.
He attacks Mina, but does not kill her; he forces her to drink his blood, which begins the
slow and terrible process that will turn her into a vampire unless he is killed. He means
to terrorize his opponents, but he reckons without Mina's strength of mind; it is Mina who
convinces the men that nothing, not even her own death and transformation into an undead
creature, can be allowed to stop them from hunting down and destroying the monster.

The group, led by Van Helsing, pursues Dracula back to Transylvania. In the mountain
snows, while the young men hunt Dracula at his castle, Van Helsing and Mina are attacked
by Dracula's undead women. Van Helsing's magical protections almost fail; it is again
Mina's will and courage that enable her to hold out against the undead until the men
return at sunrise. The light of the sun destroys the undead women.

The group tracks down Dracula as he tries to escape to his castle. In a tremendous
battle, they succeed in killing him, but at a price: Arthur Holmwood, one of the three men
who loved Lucy, is mortally wounded and dies in Mina's arms--but not before he sees that
the curse of the vampire is lifted from her.

Van Helsing

We need no proofs; we ask no one to believe us.
We know what we know:
that some men so loved these brave and gallant women
that they dared do much for their sakes.
It is finished.

(blackout)

Production details

Our adaptation of Dracula includes 31 named characters, 8 women, 23 men. With appropriate doubling, it
can be played by a cast of 15 to 18 people. It is important that it be staged lightly and
fluidly, with rapid transitions between scenes; for this reason, we have structured it so
that major changes of locale occur only at act breaks. The running time of the
production, including two intermissions, should be approximately 2 hours and 40 minutes.